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Eight months ago, I wrote a blog post titled “A conversation with my younger self.” In this blog post, I talked with my 7-year-old self and tried to tell her the things I imagined she needed to hear at the time. Things like, “You are not alone,” “The pain won’t last forever,” and “I love you.” More recently, I’ve come to the understanding that I need to become closer with my younger self. I need to sit down and talk with her again to find out what she needs. By doing this, I might be able to figure out what it is I need right now. That younger self is a part of me (though she may currently feel very far away), and I think she might need me as much as I need her right now.

I’m standing in front of a hospital room door in a place that is all too familiar: Shriner’s Hospital for Children in Greenville, SC. I spent enough time here as a kid, and the familiar sights and sounds are a tad too close for comfort. However, the distant hum of the air hockey table in the lobby brings a small smile to my face as I remember how, on the good days, I played as many games of air hockey as I could before becoming too tired.

Nurses walk past me bringing various things to other children on this hall. I look at the door I am in front of, knowing I am meant to go inside. I place my ear against the door to try to hear any kind of conversation, but all I hear is crying. I take a deep breath to try to calm my nerves. My younger self is inside that room, and she needs me. Before I can talk myself out of it, I turn the knob and walk in.

Upon entering the room, it appears that all the lights are off. It’s not until I make my way to the far left corner of the room that I see a fiber-optic Christmas tree radiating different splashes of color onto the wall behind it. My younger self is curled up onto her side and watching the colors change. She holds her stuffed hippo tightly against her chest, her arms constricting and relaxing around him as she cries.

“Hey Amelia,” I whisper as I stand at the end of her hospital bed, hoping I don’t startle her.

She looks up, blinking a few times before making the connection, and then turns back towards the red and green lights.

“You told me before that it would be okay,” she says.

I look down at my feet, remembering the first conversation we had in the park when she was 7. I didn’t know how to discuss it then, and even now when she’s 12, I continue to find myself at a loss. How is it possible to discuss a pain so raw and true while at the same time trying to be comforting and reassuring?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to scare you,” I tell her.

She glances quickly towards me, and before she turns away, I notice the tears in her eyes. I sigh, knowing her pain so well. I walk around to the side of her bed, pulling up a chair so that I can sit beside her.

“The nightmares are almost as bad as the actual pain, and then the spasms wake me up, and it’s like I’m living the nightmare,” she says.

“I know it’s scary, and I know it hurts. But it’s okay to cry. I’m right here.”

Without thinking, I place my hand on her head, carefully brushing back her curly brown hair so that I can see her face, her blue eyes. As I look into the eyes of my 12-year-old self, I see it all: the pain, the loneliness, the fear…and for a few seconds, I feel every piece of it all over again, even the spasms that seemed to come out of nowhere. I touch my own scars as I remember, and it isn’t until I feel the pressure of her hand wrapping around my wrist that I look up. She’s staring right at me, and her hand is wrapped around my wrist so tightly that I can tell she’s trying to picture the long road ahead of her.

As her eyes move back towards the changing lights on the fiber-optic Christmas tree, I crawl into her hospital bed, allowing her body to curl up against my own. As she holds tightly to my hand and we stare together at the lights changing from red to green to blue, I hug her against me, remembering how much I longed for an older sister who would hold me during those scary and lonely nights of spasms and nightmares.

For the past 4 years, ever since I was 16, I have read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar around this time of year. Though I never planned to re-read it every year around the holidays, that’s just how it turned out. In all honesty, The Bell Jar is probably one of the most depressing books I have ever read, but it is also one of the most accurate portrayals of madness, or descending into madness, from a literature standpoint that I have discovered as well. I guess you could say I love it because of its psychological aspects. However, despite how depressing the novel is, there is a reason Sylvia Plath is viewed as an acclaimed poet and writer. Her words, when put together, form sentences that allow you to feel something. Granted, the feelings her words bring to light aren’t necessarily happy ones, but in all honesty, Sylvia Plath wrote about life, her life. She didn’t sugarcoat it. She didn’t pretend she was happy when she wasn’t. She threw her readers right into the darkness and the loneliness of her life and her mind, and in a strange way, it’s beautiful.

Here are some quotes from The Bell Jar I thought I’d share:

“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

“I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

“At this rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”

“I am sure there are things that can’t be cured by a good bath but I can’t think of one.”

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

“Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.”

“I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead — after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.”

“The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water—as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.”

Last night, I started reading Truth & Beauty by Anne Patchett, which is a memoir of Anne Patchett’s friendship with troubled author and poet, Lucy Grealy. Here is a synopsis according to GoodReads:

Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir, “Autobiography of a Face,” she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In “Truth & Beauty,” the story isn’t Lucy’s life or Ann’s life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined . . . and what happens when one is left behind.

This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

Since starting this book, I have seen myself in Lucy Grealy. Though I have not faced what she went through, the loneliness, fear, and desire to belong are all feelings that I have known all too well. Lucy’s words throughout the novel (seen especially in the letters she writes to Ann), are heartbreaking and brutally honest, but in more than one point in the book, I have felt like the words have been taken from my own soul. Even though this is definitely not the first time that I have seen myself mirrored in the emotions of someone else, I feel like this is one of the few times that it’s been so spot on. Throughout the book, Lucy exhibits numerous times when she is down on herself due to her situation. However, that being said, she is a poet, and writing is the way that she comes back to herself. Writing and her friendship with Ann are what allow her to come back to her reality with gusto. Though I am only about halfway through the book at this point, I have found myself, on more than one occasion, clutching the book almost like a life-line, holding it close to my heart and whispering words from the novel that seem to apply to my own life.

“Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”

When I came across the above quote, I smiled. I smiled with the realization that during certain times in my life, I too have viewed writing as a friend, as the friend who is always there, day or night, waiting to welcome you home with open arms and a carton of ice cream. Yes, the ice cream addition was my own tid bit, but it’s what writing has been for me for so long: the one thing that I can come back to, again and again, like a long-lost friend that you never seem to lose touch with no matter how much time has passed. A friend with whom you can pick up right where you left off, as if you saw them just yesterday and not years ago. Thankfully, I have had the pleasure of having more than one friend like that in my life, and it is one of the best feelings I have come to find in this life. Sure, there are other things that come close to that kind of magic, but they aren’t moments that are also full of deep conversations that last into the early hours of the morning or moments of laughing until your stomach hurts.

“That is one thing I’ve learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it’s pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.”

Truth & Beauty is full of more honesty than I can only hope to achieve one day with my own memoir. It’s not even just honesty that causes you to pause and think, That’s got to be truth. Those feelings are so raw that the only place they could have come is from the deepest and most authentic part of the soul. It’s more than that, if at all possible. It’s sitting on the kitchen floor with a cup of coffee in one hand and the book in the other, staring down at the page and thinking, I can only hope that one day I am as in touch with the deep and dark parts of myself like this author is able to portray. Though I have become incredibly introspective since beginning my memoir in January, I have not reached this level of raw authenticity. To do so, I believe it takes many more months, if not years, of sitting in the dark corners of your memories patiently awaiting the day when they decide to come out into the harsh light of day. You’ve got to sit in the dark and get to know them on a level that’s more true than you’ve ever known. You must sit with them, day and night, until you know their features and ways in which they move through the world. Until your breathing matches their own with such accuracy that you can no longer tell the difference between your breaths and theirs.

“Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.”

Though I am lucky to have an incredible best friend, when I read the above passage, the first thing that popped into my head was the level of comfort that can only be achieved through a childhood friend. I thought of a friend that I have known since kindergarten, and the nights that we would lie in my bed and stare up at the ceiling, talking about our futures like they were millions of miles away. The nights that we would hold hands when we got scared in the middle of the night, only to end up burying our faces in pillows a moment later when we were overcome with laughter. We looked at each other then, smiling and breathing heavily once the laughter subsided, not even knowing what we found so funny, and yet realizing that nothing could top the happiness that had been wrapped up in that moment. It enveloped us, that pure bliss, wrapping us up like a quilt that was stitched with every happy memory of our relatively short lives. We knew, no matter what, that we had each other.

Even though today isn’t the “official” one-year birthday of lifeintheblueridges, I will be starting NaNoWriMo tomorrow. Therefore, my post tomorrow will be my writing piece for day one of NaNoWriMo rather than a “Yay lifeintheblueridges is one year old today” post. However, I knew that I couldn’t go full tilt into my first NaNoWriMo experience without celebrating the one-year birthday of this blog.

As well as November 1st being the one-year birthday this blog (in which I have written one blog post every day for an entire year), it is also the celebration of the beginning of my journey to find myself. Yes, that may sound cliché, but it’s true. Since I started my blog, I have become a completely different person. When I first began, I had no idea that my words would act as a gateway into what I strive to do in life: advocate for people with disabilities. I first began acting as an advocate in January of this year when I made the decision to share my own story of living with Cerebral Palsy. Though it was a very spur of the moment decision that was made one evening as I sat in bed thinking back on my life in and out of hospitals and how hard it was not having someone who understood my pain and fear, I knew that it was a decision that would stick. I could feel it.

I am proud to say that 10 months later, the decision has remained strong. More than anything, it has grown. Though I know that part of the growth has to do with the inner strength that I have rediscovered within myself, I also know that it has a lot to do with the support and encouragement that I have received from the blogging community. Before beginning my blog a year ago, I never knew that the blogging community was as close to a home with a strong sense of belonging that I’d ever hope to find. Even though I am sure that there will be other places along the way that will allow me to feel a similar sense of belonging, I know it started here. I have no doubt that as I continue to share my story, I will continue to become more confident in myself. However, I also will be sure to not forget those who helped me first begin to recognize my true self: my parents, my friends, my mentors, and all of you lovely blog followers.

It’s always so crazy to think of how much can happen in a year. When I began this blog one year ago, I didn’t know that this is where it would lead. I didn’t know that I would reach a point where it didn’t scare the hell out of me to talk about my life with Cerebral Palsy. I didn’t know I’d be able to talk about certain memories without crying because I could remember the pain so vividly. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d be able to revisit any of the painful memories at all. For so long, they were stored away. I kept them in the dark recesses of my mind, and I never even considered the possibility of bringing them out into the light. The simple thought of reliving the moments in my life that were filled with so much pain and fear was unimaginable. However, I think all of that began to change when I realized that I had the power to help other kids with disabilities feel less alone by sharing my own story. Truthfully, all of it changed because of Grace.

Grace. The twelve-year-old girl who I know who has Cerebral Palsy. The girl who is facing what I’ve faced, and yet always seems to have the biggest smile on her face. The girl who looks up to me as if I have hung the moon and the stars. And yet, she’s also the girl who has the ability to break my heart since, at the time, I knew I’d never be able to save her from the pain. There was nothing I could do that would result in Grace not having to feel the emotional and physical pain that I have had to face my entire life. However, eventually, I thought of a way I could help Grace. Though it may not be in the way that I wished, I know that I can help Grace (and many others like her) by sharing my own story and bringing to light the pain, fear, loneliness and rejection that I have faced throughout my life. Grace. The girl who I feel like I can completely relate to since we know each other’s pain. The girl who often sends me spiraling back into painful memories that have been long gone and over for many years by simply being present in my life. And yet, I long to help her see that she is not alone, that she is strong, and that she is loved. I long to help her see that she is one of the reasons why I’m writing my memoir. Maybe even the sole reason.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if I had the opportunity to speak with a younger version of myself. I wonder what I would say. I wonder what advice I would give to my 7-year-old self, the little girl with the nervous smile who has yet to go through 3 intense surgeries and many, many years of physical therapy. I wonder how it would feel to talk with someone who I knew so well, but yet couldn’t completely relate to since she hadn’t yet gone through all the pain that she would experience in her future. I wonder…

I’m sitting on a bench in a small park that I don’t recognize. There is a playground with swings and a play set, which are all just a few feet from where I’m sitting. Kids are playing in every available space in the park, but I feel like I’m a thousand miles away from their voices. It’s not until I hear her bubbly laugh that I know where I am. As I look over at the play set, she climbs out of the tube slide, practically falling right out into the sand because she’s laughing so hard. A moment later, her eyes lock with mine, and I know. The girl with the nervous smile, bubbly laugh and bright blue eyes is the younger me. However, it’s not until I look down a second later to see the braces on her feet that I’m certain my assumption is correct. Even though my stomach feels like it’s flipped inside out, I get up from where I’m sitting and walk towards the younger me.

“Hi, can I play with you?” I ask. She looks up at me with the hugest grin on her face.

“Yes, but only if we sit right here in the sand. I don’t really want to get up.”

“That’s perfectly fine, Amelia,” I say, as I sit down in the sand beside her.

She is focused on putting her arms as far down into the sand as she can, so it takes her a moment to realize what I said.

“Wait, how did you know my name?”

“Because I’m you. I’m you at 20 years old. We are the same person.”

The younger Amelia looks at me quizzically for a second, and then asks, “Does this mean that we can be friends?”

I can’t help but laugh as I remember what I was like when I was younger. Even at the age of 7, I wanted acceptance. More than anything, I wanted friends. Though those two things are something that I still find myself longing for, it was intensified when I was younger. It was often the only thing I could think about since it held such a strong connection to being just like the other kids, the “normal” kids.

I find myself staring with amazement at my younger self, wondering where to even begin.

“You have a wonderful best friend waiting in your future. In fact, there are many, many friends that will be in your life. However, the one I’m referring to, she’s everything you’ve ever hoped for in a best friend.”

“Why can’t she be here now?” the younger me asks.

“She hasn’t met you yet. She won’t come into your life until you’re 16, but I promise you, she’s the kind of best friend that you have always wanted.”

Instead of concentrating on playing in the sand, I now have the attention of my younger self as she looks up at my face with curiosity, so I continue.

“You’ve got a long road ahead of you, and it’s not something that anyone is going to able to prepare you for. It’s going to be incredibly hard. However, trust me when I say that you can get through it. It’s going to feel close to impossible some days, especially on the days when the pain gets really bad, but I promise you’ll get through it.”

The younger me then looks down at the braces that are on her feet and touches the plastic ever so lightly with her fingertips.

“I’m scared,” she whispers softly.

“I know,” I say. “It’s okay to be scared.”

“You’ll get stronger,” I tell her. “It may seem overwhelming now, but eventually it becomes like second nature. You’ll fall, time and time again. But you know what’s amazing about you?”

The younger me looks at me expectantly, but I know her nervousness lies just below the surface.

“You get back up…every time,” I say.

“Why? Why do I have to keep trying?” she asks.

“Because it’s the only way you can move forward. It’s the only way you can be independent.”

Even though I see the younger me roll her eyes at me, I know that my words are impacting her because she takes my hand and squeezes it. As her fingers link with mine, I am overcome with love for the little girl who has yet to know the intense pain that she will face. I have to look away from her before she realizes that I’m crying. As I wipe away my tears, I look off into the distance to see the sun setting behind the trees.

“I have to go soon,” the younger me says.

I nod, unable to say anything. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk away. However, I say the one thing I’ve wanted to tell her all along.

“I love you. So so much,” I say, letting the tears fall and knowing that the younger me doesn’t grasp the magnitude of this moment. If only she knew that I would save her from all of this pain if I were able to. However, deep down, I know that I can’t do that. She has to go through it. She has to go through it if she wants to become me.

She hugs my legs tightly, and the warmth of her small body against my own makes me smile.

“I’m so happy that I get to be you when I get older,” she says.

She turns to go, and as I watch her walk away from me, her last words weigh heavily on my mind. Though she may want desperately to be me, I know that I need to remember to be her as well. I know that little girl is still within me, and she is showing me just as much love as I wanted to be sure and show her.

“A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

The above quote is from Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and when I came across it this morning while on GoodReads, it really stuck with me. Maybe it’s because I know after reading Jeanette Winterson’s memoir that she had a really tough life. Maybe it’s because I am reminded that even though I persevere and trudge on, I have a tough life. Like Jeanette, I have constantly continued to find myself not in other people or places…but in words.

However, I’m not referring to the idea that literature has acted as my only finding place. Although, I do believe that it all began with literature. At a young age, during the days that I would go inside my closet where I had pillows, blankets and a light, I’d close my closet door and pour over the words. I’d lose myself in the words that I thought only I felt: those words that signified loneliness, being different, feeling pain and not feeling like there was a place that I belonged. Over time, I found myself in those words as I realized that what I was feeling wasn’t just confined to my own situation. I saw myself mirrored in others who, though they didn’t have Cerebral Palsy, still felt some of the same emotions that I struggled with from the very beginning. Even though there aren’t necessarily specific literary characters that I remember feeling especially connected with, it never was about making specific connections. In terms of literature, many of us recognize pieces of ourselves in other characters, and the sense that we are able to relate to them on some level acts as a safety net, a blanket that keeps the cold out, even if only for a moment.

As I began experimenting with my own words and realizing that I too could express the emotions that I was feeling, my own words became my safety net. Even though other literature still had the same effect that it always did in terms of helping me to feel less alone, the discovery that I could use my own words to achieve the same effect was life-changing. Rather than immersing myself in literature that had pieces of myself woven throughout it, I created words that held every aspect of me. Instead of just bits and pieces, I was entirely present within my own words. Within my words, all the emotions were there, waiting to be uncovered. The loneliness, the fear, the pain, the tears, the feeling of being so different that there wasn’t a place that I fit. Within my own words, I made all the emotions visible. As I removed them from the dark places that they had been hiding in for so long, they became even more real. Instead of simply residing in my thoughts, they were given a heart, a way to live and breathe in an environment that was separate from me, and yet was an environment that I had completely created.

Today, not much has changed. If anything, my words have become much more authentic and honest. Instead of beating around the bush in terms of the emotions that I have felt and continue to feel, I have plunged right in. I’ve found myself spending hours sitting in the darkness of my emotions, trying to find the perfect way to give them life. Though uncovering every aspect of my emotions has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, my words continue to act as a finding place. I am the truest I have ever been to myself when I am writing. Because with words, I can’t hide. There’s nothing to hide behind. My words still reside in the place that they always have: inside me. Through giving them life and allowing them to breathe on their own, it’s as if I’m living in two places at once. I’m living my current life, but I’m also living in the words that are written down. If one day in the distant future you see a book by me on the bookshelves, I hope you find me there.

Last night, my friend Olive and I went to see a band called First Aid Kit perform at the Orange Peel, a popular, but small live music venue in downtown Asheville. First Aid Kit is “a Swedish folk duo composed of sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg, whose close vocal harmonies and woodsy, folk-influenced songwriting take influence from the likes of Fleet Foxes and Joanna Newsom.”

I first recognized the connection between music and writing when First Aid Kit played their song, “Emmylou.” Take a look at the chorus of the song:

I’ll be your Emmylou and I’ll be your June
If you’ll be my Gram and my Johnny too
No, I’m not asking much of you
Just sing little darling, sing with me

Even though this song specifically refers to singing, I feel like it can apply to writing as well. The great thing about singing (and writing) is that even though it can be a one-person job, the pure joy in it is found when it’s shared with others. Yes, the majority of the time when I write, I write for me. I used to sing as well, and when I did so, it was mainly due to the fact that it made me happy. However, how lonely would writing be (and singing for that matter) if we weren’t able to touch people with our words and music? In my opinion, it wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding. Yes, it is an incredible feeling when I’m able to write out a specific memory and know that simply writing it out has brought me a sense of comfort that wasn’t there before. However, I don’t think I would be able to push through my writing ruts and my bad writing days if it weren’t for the people who were supporting me and encouraging me to keep on writing. I feel like it’s very similar in terms of singing. After all, when you go to concerts, you always hear the musicians constantly thanking their listeners for their love and support. I have no doubt that in their minds, they wouldn’t have been able to push through the hard days of songwriting without the support and love from their fans.

Though there were so many years that I wrote simply for me and me alone, that focus has definitely shifted over the last year. Even though I still do write for myself due to the fact that it’s incredibly therapeutic, I also write in order to impact others with my words. I write to share my story. However, I share my story because I want it to help others: others with CP, others who want a window into what CP is like (like the parents and friends of kids with CP), others who don’t know much about CP but have a desire to learn. Without the presence of those “others” wanting and needing me to keep sharing my story, writing about my life would be so much harder. Therefore, it is because of the support and encouragement from all of you that I am able to sit down at my computer every day and share my story, though some days it seems to come together very slowly. Thankfully, there’s no time frame for my writing. The only required constant is writing something, anything every day.